Question and answer systems utilize the same corpus content for all users when formulating answers. However, in many information access scenarios, differential access to different users is desired. For example, differential access may be preferred for the following situations: if a user has paid for additional and/or high value content, when confidential information is shared within a company versus externally-visible information, and when special information (e.g., security clearance information, health care information, etc.) access is granted to certain individuals. When differential access is assigned in current question and answer systems, access privileges are typically assigned at a file-space permissions level or by static user profiles matched to document-level metadata such as tagging particular documents with appropriate tags (e.g., “company confidential” tags). Such methods are manually determined and are time consuming.
Thus, an improved question and answer system that allows for differential access for different users is desired.